"...but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”
- Catherine Morland, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
The first two episodes of Sanditon (2019) have come to Masterpiece Theatre.
I watched them with great curiosity to see if Sanditon (2019) could possibly be as horrid as every true-hearted Janeite thought it would be.
My answer is the same as Isabella Thorpe's: “Yes, quite sure..."
Sanditon (2019) has a great cast, lovely costumes and amazing locations but so far the storyline is more akin to horrid Gothic novels than the delightful last fragment of a novel written by Jane Austen.
I have reread Jane Austen's Sanditon just to make sure I'm not misjudging the TV miniseries. There's a fair amount of material to work with in those twelve chapters and sadly Andrew Davies seems to have only used the characters names. Even their personalities have been vastly changed and some of the characters were endowed with all sort of vices that would have made dear Miss Jane turn in her grave!
There were some interesting bits and I really wanted to like the Parkers but alas the delightful Parkers were even so changed that it was difficult to enjoy their parts of the story.
Will I continue watching? Probably but not sure it will be on my list to ever watch again.
To quote Mr. Knightley: "Very badly done indeed!"
